The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development
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Highlights
- We can state the root cause of the Dwight-Phyllis dynamic as follows: the depth of any transaction is limited by the depth of the shallower party. A trivial example: if you speak English and French, and your friend only speaks English, you will be forced to converse in English. Psychological development is more complex and continuous than the acquisition of multiple discrete languages, but the same principle applies. So this isnāt a particularly subtle point, but it has complicated implications. This one in particular: If the situational developmental gap between two people is sufficiently small, the more evolved person will systematically lose more often than he/she wins. This is the curse of development. Hereās a picture: when you develop psychologically, and leave somebody behind, your odds of winning get worse before they get better.
- The Three Laws of Arrested Development So far this is trivial stuff, widely understood, and offers nobody any advantage. Here is the non-trivial stuff, compressed into three handy laws: 1. Your development is arrested by your strengths, not your weaknesses. 2. Arrested-development behavior is caused by a strength-based addiction 3. The mediocre develop faster than either the talented or the untalented An alternative way of looking at these three laws is to note that defense mechanisms emerge to sustain addictions even when the developmental environment that originally nourished it vanishes. Defense mechanisms though, are more useful as a partial catalog of phenomenology than as a foundational idea.
- We can now explain why you are likely to lose in the Curse of Development zone. Broadly, three forces are at work, and the Dwight-Phyllis example showcases all of them: 1. The less-developed person does not know what he/she does not know, and is typically attempting to operate from their regressed comfort zone of strength, which to you represents a zone of unrewarding mediocrity that you are attempting to leave/have left behind. This lends your opponent confidence. 2. Your own knowledge is fresh, unstable and not yet ingrained as second nature. You are acutely aware of, and anxious about, your beginner status in your new level. This makes you lack confidence. 3. To win through persuasion, you must teach (a superior-inferior transaction) without first reversing the default unfavorable status relationship (you: not confident, low-status, he/she: confident, high-status)
- In Part I, I noted that for the Clueless, āThe most visible sign of their capacity for self-delusion is their complete inability to generate an original thought.ā Why is lack of originality a clear indicator of cluelessness? Here is why: delusions are closed logical schemes, where reality is mangled into the service of a fixed script through defense mechanisms, with the rest of the meaning thrown away. To manufacture original thought you have to look at/listen to reality in open ways for data. That is why Michaelās database is so full of movie lines. Movies are goldmines of canned situation-reactions that donāt require much present-reality data to retrieve. When kids quote adults or movies, they seem precocious, and gain approval. In an era where more kids are raised by TV than by parents, parroting movie lines comes more naturally than repeating bromides learned from parental figures or at churches and temples.